Archaeologists in Bulgaria made a surprising discovery in ancient Roman sewers last week: a well-preserved marble statue taller than a human.
“We discovered it by chance,” said Lyudmir Vagarinsky, the excavation’s scientific director. “We were amazed. The whole statue appeared before our eyes.”
The find may shed light on how people in what is now Bulgaria fought to defend their religion as Christianity spread through the ancient world. The sewers may have been a hiding place where pagans tried to protect the imposing statue from Christian fanatics, who sometimes destroyed the heads of their pagan gods.
They appear to have succeeded: Although researchers have yet to excavate the entire statue, its face and head show no signs of destruction.
“It’s a miracle he survived,” Dr. Vagarinski said.
He and his colleagues discovered the marble in the soil last week during scorching summer heat while carrying out routine excavations near the village of Rupite, in southwestern Bulgaria, close to the Greek border.
Dr Vagarinsky said they tried to contain their excitement when they saw a marble foot, then carefully carved toenails, then legs growing upwards, then a torso, and finally a head.
“It was just waiting for us,” he said. It was as if the statue had found them, not the other way around.
This wouldn’t be the first ancient statue to emerge from a nasty ditch: a Roman construction worker. Marble statues were also discovered The statue, which appeared in the sewers last year, is likely a depiction of Hercules.
The Bulgarian statue, which Dr Vagarinsky believes represents the god Hermes, may have been buried in the late 4th century. He believes it was placed in the sewer a few years after Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD.
The pagans of the ancient city where the statue was found, then called Heraclea Syntica, Perhaps they wanted to protect their treasures from being defaced by Christians.
“They tried to preserve the memories of these gods in secrecy,” Dr Vagarinsky said.
He also believes the statue may have been buried after A.D. 388, when the region was hit by a powerful earthquake that devastated the city, likely destroying infrastructure and causing the sewer system to fail, he said.
But despite the sewer system being abandoned after the earthquake, it remained strong and became a sort of burial ground for pagan history, Dr Vagarinski added.
“The sewer may not be in the right place, but at least it would be intact,” said the Reverend Professor Martin Hennig, an expert on Roman art at Oxford University who was not involved in the excavation. “Nobody would want to touch it,” he added.
Dr Vagarinski said part of the statue’s right arm is missing and appears to have been amputated, and its left hand may also be damaged, but otherwise the statue appears to be largely intact.
“It is rare and exciting to find a nearly intact statue, especially one of this high quality,” Elizabeth Marlowe, director of Colgate University’s museum studies program, who was not involved in the excavation, said in an email.
The statue’s geographic location may also give researchers insight: Dr Marlow writes that many of these well-preserved statues have been looted and “appear to have turned up out of nowhere in dealers’ shops in Switzerland or New York”.
This means that no matter how remarkable the find, clues as to its origins are often missing – details that smugglers try hard to erase in order to thwart cultural authorities trying to return the artefacts to their original locations.
“If this had appeared on the art market, one would never imagine it came from a small town in the Bulgarian hinterland,” Dr Marlowe writes. “One would imagine it had come from a wealthy Italian city or private estate.”
Such striking marble statues, a rare find in southwestern Bulgaria, could help our understanding of Heraclea Syntica, which Dr Marlow said is a little-known Roman site. “This has the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of the culture of the region,” she wrote.
For now, Dr Vagarinskiy and his team are focused on carefully digging the statue out, which they hope to complete fully this week, after which he and other researchers will work to date and analyse the statue before putting it on display at a local history museum.
“It’s a sensation,” he says. “You don’t often find statues this big.”
Boriyana Zhambazova Contributed report.